Google slips Image ads, Amazon launches windowshop.com, MS Office for the web, Google settles lawsuit,

Google Slips Image Ads into Search Results  
A search for diamonds, for example, brings up a text ad from Blue Nile that enables users to see more information without leaving the search page. When clicked, product listings — complete with images — appear, "[consuming] the entire window,"
Amazon on Friday launched, in beta, a new e-commerce site, Windowshop.com, which allows users to not only window-shop but also to sample - and actually purchase - books, movies, music and videogames, according to the Amazon Web Services blog.

Lightweight versions of the popular office productivity apps are meant to offer a versatility in deployment, not counter OpenOffice.

Settling a legal battle, Google reached an agreement with book publishers and authors that clears the way for both sides to more easily profit from digital versions of printed books. The agreement, under which Google would pay $125 million to settle two copyright lawsuits over its book-scanning efforts, would allow it to make millions of out-of-print books available for reading and purchasing online.

Prominent German newspaper publisher Axel Springer announced that it was expanding its digital initiative by launching www.autobild.com.cn, a Chinese version of its automobile magazine Auto Bild. The company said it will continue to venture into the global Internet market



New Pepsi logo, Linkedin search, 4G, Mtvmusic.com, Azure, Top 5 MVNOs


How long does it take to remake an icon? Try five months. That's the amount of time Pepsi took to revamp its famous logo, after top executives Indra Nooyi and Massimo d'Amore called for a "quantum leap" forward in transforming the soft-drink category and defining Pepsi as a cultural leader, said Frank Cooper, Pepsi's VP-portfolio brands.

Popular professional social networking site LinkedIn is rolling out its new search platform. Like most major releases, it will only be available to a small percentage at first.

Hesse looks to fast-track WiMAX roll-out with a little help from the feds while dodging the Net-neutrality bullet -- and hints at company's Android plans.

MTV Debuts MTVmusic.com Music Video Portal  
MTV Networks on Monday debuted a new website that will host exclusively music videos from the company's expansive catalog. Like the Hulu video joint venture between NBC and News Corp., MTVmusic.com seeks to draw traffic from the Web's other huge music video depository, YouTube. 

The new site features improved nutrition and allergen data, along with a Google maps store locator, copies of the latest TV ads, new menu items and downloadable discount vouchers.   http://www.bk.com

Microsoft on Monday introduced Windows Azure, which will make it possible for developers to easily build applications accessible in real-time over the Internet using existing Microsoft programming languages. The service marks a key shift for the company because its business traditionally has revolved around programs that run solely on a user's own device, such as a PC.

Mr. Levinson, a college dropout with dozens of failed jobs on his résumé, has won 11 contests — earning more than $200,000 in money and prizes


Intel apologieses, Q3 click fraud at 16%, Display pricing down

Intel issues apology over iPhone remarks 
The executives, speaking at the Intel Developer Forum in Taipei, Taiwan, claimed the iPhone suffers from slow browsing because it uses an ARM processor instead of an Intel chip. Apple laptops and desktops use Intel processors so it pays to apologize.

Small Brands Teach Big Lessons  
For some small companies, social media has proven to be a godsend of low-cost, effective brand building. Take Bacon Salt, an unlikely product dreamed up last year after a night out drinking by two Seattle buddies. What began as a half-joking idea -- what if there was a spice that made everything taste like bacon -- soon became a bustling business that's sold 600,000 units in 18 months, thanks mostly to the harnessing of the word-of-mouth power of social media.
The average click-fraud rate for Q3 2008 held steady overall at 16%, but a 10% rise in botnet activity - and a 28% overall click-fraud rate from botnets - is potentially undermining ad-industry efforts to combat click fraud, according to figures from Click Forensics' Click Fraud Index, MarketingCharts reports.

Online ad prices consistently declined in 2008, falling 21% since Q2 and 27% since Q1, with small sites and some verticals most affected by the faltering economy, according to the PubMatic AdPrice Index for Q3 2008, writes MarketingCharts. 



Google Analytics shakes up competition, Jetblue on twitter, Aol begins shutdown of Aol pictures, bluestring, xdrive

Google Shakes Up Competition   
In one beta tester's opinion, the Omnitures, Web Trends, and Coremetrics of the world should be very concerned about Google's new (free) enterprise-level analytics. Jeff Campbell believes the search engine's release of new features this week addresses shortcomings in typical Web analytics packages. Of the announced additions, Advanced Segments and Custom Reporting have had the biggest impact for this user who loves to slice, dice, and segment visitors as many ways as possible, Campbell writes. Not only does Advanced Segments eliminate the need for Profiles, you have back-populated, detailed data on the fly that rivals Omniture's premium Discover service

Tweeting in earnest began on the 21st of October, when JetBlue published the following message to its 5,400 "followers": "Flt 194 LAS-JFK taxis to its gate: Our last flight into JFK's T6."

Next week, AOL says, they'll begin to communicate the news to consumers around the shutdown of three of those properties - AOL Pictures, BlueString and Xdrive. AOL Pictures will close in December, and users will have the chance to move photos to American Greetings PhotoWorks, download photos to a personal computer, or purchase an archive of photos on DVD. Photos will be available until June 2009.


Russia rejects Google's ad firm buy, Blackberry allows web publishers to push content to phones

"We were a company with $11 billion in sales, and now are one with $83.5 million in sales and 24 $1 billion brands. So it's steady and sustainable and a remarkable growth journey." He says it's also all about growth in terms of what the company stands for. "We have a tendency to overcomplicate things. The simpler the better; the simpler the more profound." 

Marketers must not only monitor blogs and news sites constantly, he says--they need to go one step further. "You want to look at building your own forums to engage customers and critics who are one and the same. You can't afford to miss it." Mendenhall used the current presidential campaign as a case in point, noting that the video "I've got a crush on Obama," which was not made by the Obama campaign, has garnered some 9.5 million views. "Thirty-five percent of all Americans have watched political ads and videos online," he says. "That's three times more than in 2004." 

Russia's anti monolpoy authority has blocked Google from buying online ad firm ZAO Begum. Google said in July that it would spend $140m to buy the ad service, ZAO Begun, from russuan web portal Rambler Media. The deal was expected the deal to be finalized during the third quarter of 2008.

In an effort to become more consumer-friendly, and expand upon its reputation for being a strong email device, Research In Motion is now letting Web publishers send content to a user's BlackBerry by using its signature push technology. RIM unveiled the service, called BlackBerry Web Signals, at the company's developer conference yesterday.

In a major turnabout, the Associated Press has just reversed course on its controversial rate plan following a board meeting today.

Newspaper Web sites attracted a record 68.3 million unique visitors in the third quarter of 2008-- equal to 41.4% of all American Internet users, according to the Newspaper Association of America. 





http://www.twitter.com/diginews

http://groups.google.com/group/diginews

http://onlineindustry.blogpspot.com

Linkedin debuts b2b network, Gates starts a new co, Google promotes G1 on home page, Yammer earns, Plastic newspaper in UK, Getty buys Jupiter Images

Comcast to offer faster Internet service at speeds upto 50 mbps  
The nation's largest cable operator and residential Internet service provider will offer speeds of up to 50 megabits per second, which would enable users to download a high-definition movie in 16 minutes and a standard-definition movie in 5 minutes.
The LinkedIn Research Network has already partnered with six market research firms--including Phoenix Marketing International and OTX--to conduct targeted B2B primary research among its network of some 30 million professionals worldwide. "B2B market research is a $100* million dollar industry, and we feel we can become a leading provider of that data," said Dan Shapero, director of business services for the LinkedIn Research Network. 

Public documents describe the new Gates entity -- bgC3 LLC -- as a "think tank." It's housed within a Kirkland office that the Microsoft co-founder established on his own after leaving his day-to-day executive role at the company this summer.

Google has added the following text to its U.S. home page: "New! The G1 is on sale now. Learn about the phone." 

Google says developers will be able to keep 70 percent of the revenue, and the remaining amount goes to carriers and billing settlement fees. Most interesting to note, Google does not take a percentage. This is completely backwards from what Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) does today, which gives developers 70 percent and keeps 30 percent for themselves. Over and over, people have pondered what a carrier's incentive will be to adopt the Android platform, well, folks, here's your answer. Google explains: "We believe this revenue model creates a fair and positive experience for users, developers, and carriers." Of course, Google is hoping to capitalize on the growing mobile advertising opportunity on the phone.

Yammer tweaks the question, asking, "What are you working on?" The goal, said its chief executive, David Sacks, is to make offices more productive. People on Yammer update colleagues on company events or ask work-related questions without clogging e-mail boxes with mass mailings.

Google is so confident that its InVideo Ads -- those semi-transparent/animated overlays it launched on YouTube last year -- are game changers, the company is turning to brainwave researchers to prove their effectiveness. The search giant -- in conjunction with MediaVest -- has partnered with NeuroFocus, a researcher that specializes in biometrics, to gauge both how users respond to InVideo ads and how well those ads complement traditional banner ads. NeuroFocus specializes

"The device looks just like a table mat and it's as light as a magazine. But onto it you can download hundreds of newspapers and - at the touch of a button - browse through them quite safely, without elbowing anyone ever again [in a crowded commuter train]," the BBC reported on its website.

Quarkbase, websitegrader, Cubestat, statbrain, popuri, Test everything

Digital photograph and online media powerhouse Getty Images announced its plans to acquire Jupitermedia Corp.'s online images business, Jupiterimages, for $96 million in cash, the company said Thursday.



AT&T ups customers with Iphone but down on profits, Google Analytics unveils 7 major updates, 52 things to do on google, Trojan condom goes online,

HP's Mendenhall Urges Marketers to Venture Into Digital Whirlwind
Mike Mendenhall, chief marketing officer at Hewlett-Packard, said the web has upended relationships between brands and consumers. In this digital age, where 1.3 billion of 6.6 billion consumers have internet access, brands must insert themselves into the global digital conversation while still adequately managing their reputations. Putting a brand out into that digital conversation can be unnerving, he admitted, because you don't know what the result will be. YouTube, along with Facebook, MySpace, countless blogs and Twitter are generating news and pushing brand conversations

Five Strategies Behind Smart, Complex Brand Models

For its "Evolve One, Evolve All" push, Trojan has partnered with various up-and-coming artists to create a dozen pieces of unique content that address situations and excuses for engaging in risky sexual activity. It is cataloging the content on EvolveOneEvolveAll.com, which is part of Viacom's MTV.com network, but the content is designed for embedding throughout the Web.

According to a recent earnings report, the company activated 2.4 million iPhones but lost $900 million in third-quarter earnings as a result of all the data and voice blowing through Apple's darling.

Google takes humans one more small step towards irrelevancy. They released a new feature in Google Labs this evening that lets users create "canned responses" to emails. So if you find yourself typing the same response over and over again to emails, you can just create a canned response and use it repeatedly. So you can, for example, set up an auto response that replies to emails from your wife or girlfriend that simply say "You're right, I agree and I'm so sorry. I love you!"

Apple didn't just ship a lot of iPhones, it shipped a lot of everything, except maybe Apple TV. The company shipped 2.6 million Macintosh computers during the quarter, a 21 percent unit growth and 17 percent revenue growth over same quarter in 2007.

The new updates are enterprise level features that Google will now be offering for free. First up is an integration with AdSense. This one will be rolled out over several months, so if you don't see it for a while, you'll know why. You'll be able to view AdSense performance based on page and referring site. Plus, you'll be able to tell where you're traffic is coming from geographically.

Soovle, facesaerch, tastekid, fasteagle, fansnap, compfight, kedrix,

It's a collection of tools and tips about using Google products and services for some everyday functions. If you're a search power user, you probably know most of them already. But Google's message seems to be, "Did you know you could do all this stuff on Google?"

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Yang's mail to staff, Britney on twitter, Android goes on sale, AA sues Yahoo, Remembering Newman, HP Schwab mull going direct

Jerry Yang's mail to staff
10% of you are fired


Apple's shares have slid more than 50 percent since the beginning of the year, and going forward, Apple's forecast is particularly foggy with CEO Steve Jobs admitting he doesn't know "how this economic downturn will effect Apple." The company posted revenues of $7.9 billion compared to the $8.02 billion that analysts expected. Net profits of $1.14 billion, or $1.26 a share, exceeded expectations of $1.10. In the year ago period, the company earned $904 million, or $1.01, on $6.22 billion in revenues.

T-Mobile USA Inc. began offering the G1, made by Taiwan's HTC Corp., at its store on the city's Market Street at 6 p.m. The launch attracted a queue of about 150 people and was headed by Christopher Laddish, a student who had been waiting since 8 a.m. to buy the phone.

Nokia's $250 million venture capital arm invested in China's mobile advertiser Madhouse, marking its first deal in the mainland, executives said on Tuesday. Nokia Growth Partners was established in 2004 by its parent and is still wholly owned by Nokia, targetting mobile technology, services and media.

Editorial functions combined; 19 positions eliminated company-wide

YourMinis was a start-page service like no other, but its feature richness and happy users fall victim to the cold business logic that so many cool startups face after being acquired. YourMinis is now primarily used to power advertising widgets for AOL, a practice that will continue but pales in comparison to the beautiful topical pages its users built with the full service over the last several years.

The airline complains that when computer users enter American's trademark terms such as AAdvantage, the name of its frequent-flier program, in a search they can be directed to competitors who pay Yahoo for the traffic

Nearly two-thirds of Internet users likely to click on online ads were weekly or daily visitors to the Website where the ad appeared; only 15% were first-time visitors and 6% went to the site sporadically.


Agencies and ad networks came in for some rough treatment at a CMO roundtable during the Association of National Advertisers' annual conference on Saturday as executives vented their dissatisfaction with agency models and ad-network performance. The chief marketing officers of Hewlett-Packard and Charles Schwab openly mulled the attractiveness of bypassing agencies to work directly with media companies and other experiments as they look to fix an agency model they see as broken.

Mr. Newman's desk was one of those plastic, poolside tables, with the umbrella up. According to the nameplate, his title was "assistant lifeguard on duty." My fondest memory was a small sign tacked to the wall that read: "'You can get straight A's in marketing and still flunk ordinary life.' ~ Paul Newman to Lee Iacocca after his Ford Pinto caught fire."


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Akamai gets into ad biz, Brash.com, Yahoo & Adbrite layoffs, Hey! Nielsen shut down, AP launches mobile news for Blackberry, myfamestar.com,

News

Big publishers have long counted on Akamai to deliver web content faster and more reliably. Now Akamai hopes it can convince those clients to count on it to deliver better ad targeting. The company is getting into the ad business and today will announce Advertising Decisions Solutions, a new division in the company that will work with its clients to apply behavioral-targeting layers to ad campaigns; it has also acquired Acerno, a company that has built itself on the notion of "predictive modeling," for $95 million.

After offering a hint about its plans last month, female-centric Glam Media has released Brash, its new male-focused lifestyle and entertainment online hub. Brash is being targeted to men 18-49 years old and is beginning life with more than 25 sites including ArtistDirect, DigitalTrends.com, Squidoo and SpirlFrog.

BBC saw strong performances across its portfolio of speech and music stations in a good quarter for radio listening, according to data released by Rajar (Radio Joint Audience Research).

Yahoo started out the year with layoffs, and it is going to end the year with more. The layoffs have been expected ever since Yahoo hired hatchet men from Bain & Co. to come help with the downsizing. The exact number of layoffs is still not known?between 1,000 and 3,000 are the numbers being discussed.


The media ratings giant said it will begin "winding down" Hey! Nielsen, an online social network launched more than a year ago, and will replace it with a new, as-yet-unnamed "consumer site." 

Launched in May, the Mobile News Network is a multimedia news portal providing anytime access to international, national and local news content from a network of local media sources. With the emergence of innovative smart phone devices, AP wanted to offer a tailored version of the Mobile News Network for BlackBerry users.

MySpace debuted its mobile application for Android on Monday. The app is now live for those who already have an Android phone, but it won't be "officially" available until Wednesday, when the device is available to the public. The app includes features like instant photo upload from Android to a MySpace profile and the ability to check out tour schedules on band profiles. The app is integrated exclusively with Shazam, allowing users to identify music and connect to the artist's MySpace page.

The nation's No. 2 cable provider this week launched a quirky site clearly geared for the kind of viral pass-along success some other efforts have managed -- but many have failed to generate.

The ZIP code targeting feature analyzes a searcher's Internet Protocol (IP) address and manually-input user data, then serves ads based on their location.

Watch the video





Redstone may sell Viacom, P&G goes direct, top 30 newspaper sites, Apple pokes fun at Vista's ad budget

 News

Media mogul Sumner Redstone, caught in the vise-like grip of the credit crunch, may be forced to sell his prized Viacom Inc., home of MTV, Nickelodeon and Paramount Studios. A sale of Viacom, or any piece of the company, would be a tremendous setback to the 85-year-old Redstone, as he has spent the better part of his professional life pulling together the crown jewel of his investment portfolio. Sources close to Redstone and Viacom say the executive's current cash situation is so dire that selling Viacom or CBS - which he also controls - is now a real possibility. Redstone used shares in the companies as collateral for loans used to back expansion plans for his privately-held National Amusements, Inc. movie theater chain.

In a tiny story with potentially massive implications, Jonathan Birchall reports that Procter & Gamble is "supporting" a Web site devoted exclusively to its brands. "In an indication of the sensitivities involved, the site is being operated by a third party, which owns the inventory," he writes. The Web site -- theEssentials.com -- brings P&G into direct brand competition with its retailers. Birchall also writes that Wal-Mart, P&G's largest customer, is hiring a strategy executive whose tasks include assessing the potential effect of direct-to-consumer sales by its own suppliers.

In a deal that buyers have been pushing for, Google TV struck an agreement last week to integrate its ad buying platform with the industry's leading transaction processor for the direct response TV industry, CoreDirect. For Google, the deal represents another stake that the company's Internet-based TV auction platform has been able to drive into the turf of traditional TV. For DRTV buyers, it makes the process of buying spots via Google much easier to analyze.

After recently buying out the 49% stake in mobile joint venture Jamba previously held by VeriSign, News Corp.'s mobile business will now be known as Fox Mobile Group. Mauro Montanaro, who has served as CEO of Jamba since January, heads FMG as CEO. The News Corp. arm will have three units focused on mobile content production (Fox Mobile Studios), licensing to third parties (Fox Mobile Entertainment) and distribution (Fox Mobile Distribution), respectively.

NYTimes.com, washingtonpost.com, USATODAY.com, LA Times, Wall Street Journal Online, Boston.com, SFGate.com/San Francisco Chronicle, New York Post, Politico, Chicago Tribune, Daily News Online Edition, DallasNews.com, Chicago Sun-Times, The Houston Chronicle, Newsday,  International Herald Tribune, The Washington Times, Philly.com, The Seattle Times, Anchorage Daily News, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Boston Herald, Baltimore Sun, Star Tribune, NJ.com, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Detroit Free Press,  MercuryNews.com, MiamiHerald.com, Village Voice Media

A major executive shakeup at Twitter last week has people once again asking pesky questions about the company's future. Like does it have one? How will it make money? And When? But Twitter investors don't find your questions amusing, and would like you stop asking now. "It's like the stupidest question in the world: How's Twitter going to make money?," said Union Square Ventures' Fred Wilson. "Eventually Google was going to make money and they figured out how to do it and they figured out a great business, and I think the same thing is true with Twitter." Nice attitude, Fred. Meanwhile, Bijan Sabet, a general partner at Twitter-backer Spark Capital, told Wired that new revenue models will be unveiled in the first half of next year. So apparently the public isn't the only party thinking revenue would be a good thing for Twitter.


Despite buzz surrounding fancy and expensive video ads, only 11% of consumers are likely to click on them, compared with 25% that would likely click on simple text ads, and 20% that would click on right banners

For what may be the first time ever, an established filmmaker has bypassed an official theater premiere — and put his work directly on the internet. Last Friday, director Wayne Wang's The Princess of Nebraska made its public debut on YouTube's Screening Room. It has since garnered nearly 153,000 views and hundreds of comments. The trailer — put on YouTube last month — has an impressive 95,000 tally.

Not one to sit idly by while its nemesis gets a $300 million makeover, Apple is out with two new commercials, one of which directly comments on the amount of money Microsoft is spending on its current advertising campaign. In the ad, we see PC divvying up Microsoft's budget allocating the lion's share to the ad campaign and a minuscule amount to fixing Vista's problems.

Tribune drops AP, google accepts Gambling ads, talkbiznow challenges linkedin, Yahoo starts an Ad blitz, Ipint sued

iPint sued by iBeer for $12.5 mn. check the video  
iBeer cites revenue loss and willful copyright infringement in Beattie McGuinness Bungay's iPint app for Carling in massive suit; small Swedish developer may be left holding the bag

In case you missed their recent announcement about Flash, Google and Adobe have teamed up on a new algorithm to index text content in Flash. As a result of the new algorithm for Flash, Googlebot now indexes "textual content in SWF files of all kinds" and extracts URLs embeded in Flash."

India is the 7th largest spam sender in the world, according to Trend Micro Inc., a global leader in Internet content security. India is the leader among Asian countries in spam, accounting for more than 4 percent of the total global spam. It is ahead of other Asian countries such as China (3.39 percent), Republic of Korea (2.57 percent) and Thailand (2.04 percent). Asia contributes 16.57 percent of the global spam volume.

After posting better-than-expected Q3 results, Google (NSDQ: GOOG) could be in line for a revenue jackpot after allowing gambling adverts in the UK from today in its search results for the first time since a self-imposed ban in 2004. Google's industry leader for entertainment and media James Cashmore told FT.com he hoped that change would "enhance the search experience for users and help advertisers connect with interested consumers" Of course, It will also make a shed-load of money—as much as £100 million extra in ad revenue by the FT's estimate. 

Blinkx, Mahalo, Cuil

Google has invested over $80 million dollars in forex trading hedges to offset the strengthening dollar against the global currencies many of their advertisers are paying them in.

Tribune Company has given a two-year notice to the Associated Press that its daily newspapers plan to drop the news service, becoming the first major newspaper chain to do so since the recent controversy over new rates began.

The BBC is encouraging TV and set-top box makers to adopt an open IPTV platform it hopes to develop. Confirming details of the rumoured Project Canvas at Cannes' Mipcom conference Wednesday, future media and technology director Erik Huggers said Auntie is mulling building an "open industry standard" that would put web video on the lounge TV. Crucially, it would allow rival program-makers to add their own content, too.

The site provides a free online work place for business professionals, and has a suite of useful office tools such as free web conferencing facilities that are not available on any other site of its kind.

Yahoo is launching an eight-week ad campaign to spread the message that Yahoo search is better — and safer — than Google and other rivals. 


Mobile firefox browser, Google loses copyright case, Youtube beats Yahoo in search, Microsoft may buy RIM,

Google loses 2 copyright cases in Germany  
lost two copyright lawsuits in Germany over displaying photos and artworks as thumbnails in a preview of search results.

In June of 2008 the U.S. had a total of 76.9 million broadband lines, and China had 76 million, a difference of 900,000

Google's Video-Sharing Site Is Racking Up as Many Queries as Yahoo

Google is collaborating with Click Forensics to clamp down on search ad click fraud.Click Forensic's FACTr (Fully Automated Click Tracking Reconciliation) service generates click-quality reports and submits them automatically to Google — so advertisers won't have to do it manually, 

With Research In Motion stock in freefall from a high of $148 on the Nasdaq just four months ago to its present sub-$60 valuation, rumors are circulating the handset maker may soon find itself the target of a takeover bid by Microsoft. Speaking to Reuters, Canaccord Adams analyst Peter Misek argues that "RIM is a massive strategic fit" for Microsoft, adding "I'm fairly certain they have a standing offer to buy them at $50 [a share]."

 Mozilla is giving the public a taste of its Firefox mobile browser, as the company debuted an alpha version of the software for the Nokia N810 Internet tabletCode-named Fennec, the browser uses the same technology as the desktop version, including its HTML rendering engine called Gekko. Mozilla said it wants to ensure that the mobile version is not inferior to the version that people use on their home computers. 


25 most imp people in wireless, Google debuts ad in maps, how bad is the economy, Myspace starts myads, Youtube signs up CBS,

News

The "MyAds" platform, available at https://advertise.myspace.com, offers a guide to help people create their own ads and then launches advertising campaigns with budgets as low as 25 dollars.

Google debuts contextual ads in maps  
The ads appear at the foot of each map in text form, and are designed to be geographically relevant to each search. The text links take users out of Google Maps to the advertiser websites.

The search giant is "watching the economy closely and making sure our expenses and revenue are very much aligned," said an uncharacteristically cautious Tim Armstrong, president-sales and commerce, to a group of travel executives last week. Taken by itself it might not be much, but it came the week before Google announced earnings-and during the same week that several analysts reduced estimates for the company.

MySpace finally launched its MyAds program this weekend, which allows anyone to create and place ads on the social network. Unlike Facebook, which allows only text ads, MyAds will allow only banner ads. Will this be the moment that lifts MySpace profits from an encouraging afterthought to full fledged sustainability, like when Google decided to team search with contextual ads? MySpace is already beating Facebook in the revenue game. Facebook will probably only generate $300 million or so in revenue this year. MySpace is ahead of it, with $850 million or so in revenue last year and a projected $1 billion in fiscal 2008.

The partnership will put YouTube in more direct competition with Hulu, the online video site owned by News Corp and General Electric's NBC Universal. Hulu features up-to-date full-length shows from News Corp's Fox networks, NBC and CBS. It also has a YouTube channel which features short-clip versions of its shows. YouTube's audience size dwarfs Hulu. YouTube is the world's largest online video site with more than 330 million users in August, according to Web audience measurement firm comScore. Hulu by comparison had just 3.3 million users. 

    * 1. Steve Jobs, CEO, Apple
    * 2. Eric Schmidt, Chairman and CEO, Google
    * 3. Ralph de la Vega, CEO, AT&T Mobility and Consumer Market
    * 4. Lowell McAdam, President & CEO, Verizon Wireless
    * 5. Dan Hesse, President & CEO, Sprint Nextel
    * 6. Robert Dotson, President and CEO, T-Mobile USA
    * 7. Kevin Martin, Chairman, Federal Communications Commission
    * 8. Barry West, President, Sprint Nextel's Xohm business unit, Future president of the new Clearwire
    * 9. Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo, President and CEO, Nokia
    * 10. Carl-Henrick Svanberg, President and CEO, Ericsson
    * 11. Mike Lazaridis, Co-Founder and Co-CEO/Jim Balsillie, Co-CEO, Research In Motion
    * 12. Paul Jacobs, CEO, Qualcomm
    * 13. Carl Icahn, Chairman, Icahn Enterprises
    * 14. Andrew Lees, Senior Vice President, Mobile Communications Division, Microsoft
    * 15. Greg Brown, President and Co-CEO, Motorola
    * 16. Marco Boerries, Executive Vice President, Yahoo Connected Life
    * 17. John Muleta, CEO, Co-Founder, M2Z Networks
    * 18. Rob Conway, CEO, GSM Association
    * 19. Sean Maloney, EVP, chief sales and marketing officer, Intel
    * 20. Roger Linquist, Chairman, CEO, MetroPCS
    * 21. Steve Largent, President and CEO of CTIA
    * 22. Dan Schulman, CEO of Virgin Mobile USA
    * 23. Brad Anderson, Chairman and CEO of Best Buy
    * 24. Ben Verwaayen, CEO Alcatel Lucent
    * 25. John Faith, General Manager and VP of MySpace Mobile



Chrome comic book, Economist's social web flop, Google's director investss in teachit, 16 brands using twitter, RD poses loss



Economist Group's £100,000 project to think up a social web platform may have flatlined last year - but the publisher now has another long tail to pin on the 10-month affair… a book chronicling the experience
Teachit, a nine-year-old web education service that shares revenue with teachers for publishing content they write, has got its first investment of an undisclosed size from one of Google's (NSDQ: GOOG) directors, amongst others. John Burke, who is MD for industry development at the search site, was already a board member in another teaching website, TeachersCount.

Dell, Starbucks, Jetblue, comcast, homedepot, Southwest airlines, whole foods market, Ford .....

The Reader's Digest Association posted an operating loss of $337 million for fiscal 2008, according to a 10-K report it filed recently with the Securities Exchange Commission. That's down significantly from the operating loss of $35 million it reported for the same period in 2007.